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| Rufus, pen and ink |
“I’ve had the privilege to be owned by some truly wonderful animals. I had the two best dogs that ever lived, a border collie and her favorite puppy, and now I have the two best cats. Not sure where I go from here if my cats don’t live as long as I do. Right now we’re the exact same age if every human year is equal to 5 cat years. I cherish the grumpy old man qualities of Pete, the alpha kitten of the litter who once tried to catch every leaf that fell and every bird that flew. I commiserate with the aches and pains of the runt of the litter, Wendy, still tiny and delicate as a kitten, now growing old and even more fragile, but always beautiful.”
I wrote that a month ago and never got around to finishing what was to be a blog about my various cats and dogs.
A couple weeks later on the second night of my trip back East, in a
motel in western NY, my sweet 13 year old cat, Wendy, had a heart attack.
I got her to a vet hospital, but she went into a seizure just as the vet
began examining her. She died a little later. The miracle is that I
found a vet hospital, in a place I'd never been before, with a veterinarian, two vet
assistants and desk staff there in the middle of the night.
Another miracle is that with my terrible sense of direction, terrible night
vision and complete inability to follow directions, I got her there within 90
minutes, in the dark, sobbing, in the rain. It helps me to know that I
did what I could.
Peter, Wendy's littermate and brother, is confused. He
must have walked ten miles when we got home to Massachusetts, looking for Wendy. He also
doesn't know how to eat by himself because he's never done it before. He
always waited until Wendy started eating before he ate. Now he just
looks at the plate and looks at me. He'll eat if I talk to him and pet
him, but not much. I think he'll be OK, though, because he's trying
to catch the woodchuck in the back yard.
This makes me think of my 4 year old grand daughter, Rose,
warrior princess extraordinaire. Her
highly emotional older sister, Elison, had just heard the news that one of the chickens
had died overnight and Elison, sobbing, said among many other things, “my heart is
breaking.” Rose, listened to it all
silently, and when there was a lull in the drama, said firmly, “My heart will
never break.” Ah, Rose.
”There are no terms to be made with sorrow. It can be cured by death and it can be
blunted or anaesthetized by various things.
Time is supposed to cure it, too.
But if it is cured by anything less than death, the chances are that it
was not true sorrow.”
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